What is list building?

List building is a way of capturing the email addresses of people who may be interested in products or services you offer.  Usually this is done using list building software (which I discuss below) and involves offering something for free that people can download.  In order for the person to download the ebook, course, or whatever other offering you have, they sign up to your list and give you permission to email them on future occasions.  Once signed up to your list, people can easily unsubscribe by clicking a link on your email if they get tired of you.

Why build a list?

List building can be great if you have a service or product that you want to offer to people.  You have built a list of people who have signed up to hear from you so you can just type one quick announcement, click a button and everyone on your list will get a copy.  Imagine that you have a training course to offer on a how to work with children therapeutically.  Previously to designing your course you have offered a free eBook on the same topic and linked this to your list building software.  You can see straight away that the list you have built will probably be very receptive to your course offer and you may even be able to fill your course through your list, depending on how many people are on it.

You can do the same for videos you may create, books, workshops etc.  This is why people who use the internet to market their products exclaim;

“there is power in the list”.

How to build a list

Here is a quick step by step guide………

1. Write something that your potential audience would want to download.  If you blog you can easily just stick all of your blog posts into one easy to read PDF and offer that as a download.
2. Convert your writing into an eBook.  This makes it easy to download and easy to read.  eBooks are usually in PDF format and can have a pretty front cover to really pull the punters in.
3. Upload your offering to your website.  In a WordPress site you will use the media section of the dashboard.
4. Attach your offering to your list building software.  The two main list builders are Aweber and Mailchimp.  the difference between these two is small and both can be useful depending on what you want to do.  A quick Google of “aweber vs Mailchimp” will fill you in on this.  Briefly, if you do not see your list getting very big then Mailchimp will do it for free for up to 2000 subscribers.  If you want to go all out with the list building thing then go with Aweber – the tool most of the big boys use.
5. Design a sign up form in the software package you chose and insert it into your website for people to sign up through.  This way, people put their details into the form, have an email sent to them to verify that they want to sign up and then they receive the freebie you designed and you have them on your list.

That’s it!  simple as 1,2,3 (er, 4,5!)

Next steps

There is nothing tricky about any of this but it does take time.  My advice is to get stuck in and do it early on your site so you can capture emails from the off.  If you really can not find the time to do this then I offer a range of list building services that you can find by going to this page.  All you have to do is supply me with the information you want to use as your freebie (step 1)as a Word document,  I will do the rest (steps, 2,3,4,5) if you have a WordPress website.  If you don’t use my contact form to send me a message and we will sort something out.

Conclusion

Your list can be a great resource that you can utilize to sell products and services to people who will more than likely be very interested in what you have to offer.  Start early with it, even before you know what you have to sell, because then when you have worked it out you have an audience that is ready to hear what you have to say.

Try AWeber’s Email Marketing Tool Risk-Free

Build links to your website for free

Here’s my plan then.  I’ll use all of these websites to build links to my Manchester Psychotherapy website and let you know how painful the experience was (and probably to remind myself why I pay people to do this for me!).

Free Linkbuilding Sites

Socialadr

Socialadr is a site that allows you to bookmark other people’s content and in return they will bookmark yours.  Bookmarking is a way of highlighting your page, blog or article to others.  It gets noticed by Google and gives a link back to your site each time it is done.  Socialadr also offer a paid service if you can’t be bothered to do it yourself although that kind of goes against the point of this article!  I would recommend you use their set up service though.  for $11 they will take out the tedium of setting up all of the book marking sites.  I used their paid service to set up the basic bookmarking systems and within about 5 hours they got back to me with my accounts all set up.  I then set up the blog post I wanted bookmarking by others.  Basically, this is a “I’ll bookmark yours if you bookmark mine” site.  I bookmarked the 5 sites I was allowed to do and earned a few credits.  I will have to do this every day in order to build up enough credit to have my site bookmarked though.  Hmmm – let’s see how this one goes.

Total time taken – about 15/20 mins.

Number of links generated – er, none yet!  Though they I say I can build thousands!

247 Backlinks

247 Backlinks is a site that you can have 1000 free backlinks to your site via forum or blog posts for free.  247 backlinks was easy to set up and will reportedly drip out around 200 links per day.  I chose the 4000+ forum posts to have my links from.  I chose this because there is a 95% certainty that the links will happen (according to their site) and I have many high PR links to my site already, so a few low PR links will mix things up a bit and should benefit me.

Total time taken – approx 15 mins.

Number of links generated – 1000 over 5 days (200 per day).

Social Monkee

Social Monkee offers 25 links per day.  You can install a plugin for Firefox that enables a small graphic of a monkey in the bottom right hand corner of your browser which you can click on to book mark that site.  It takes a bit of work from that point though.  Social Monkee requires spinning syntax to be used.  If you have never spun anything before then here’s a simple explanation.  Spinning allows more than one version of text to be displayed each time your article is published.  Quite simply, you have to type alternative words that the software can pick to give you different text each time the bookmark is used.  For example, this sentence might look like this if spun…..{for example|e.g|as an example, this sentence|this information might look|appear like this if|when spun}.

It takes some getting used to spinning text and there are plenty of programs out there that will do it for you, the best of which is probably the best spinner (appropriately named).  If you are only going to use it for this sort of thing though, it’s not worth purchasing.  Just do it manually.

Total time taken – 30 mins

Number of links generated – 25 per day.

IMT Website Submitter

IMT website submitter is a simple one.  You just bung your URL and keyword into the spaces provided and click the magic button.  The site creates over 2500 pages with your information on and then pings these sites to encourage the Googlebots to trawl them.  The downside of the site is that you have to wait for the site to create the pages which can take some time.  I just left the page open to get on with it whilst going to the next site on this list

Total time taken -bloody ages, but it won’t bother you, just let it get on with it and move to the next free links site.

Number of links – 2500ish

Free Traffic System

Free Traffic System.  This site allows you to submit your articles to an article directory for free.  You still have to write the articles you are publishing and for that reason I did not try this one out.  They say you can have your article submitted to 30 directories for free which is a potential 30 more links.  Links means movement up google so the more the merrier.

Total time taken – This one will take a while for you to write the article and submit to the site.  I’d estimate at least 2 hours from my experience of doing this.

Number of links – 30 per article.  Potentially more if others want your article on their website.

Are you ready to invest your time?

So there they are, five websites that give you the ability to build links to your site for free.  If you did them all you would spend around three hours generating about 3000-4000 links.  Not bad at all.  Do remember though, it’s not just the amount of links that count, it’s the quality of links.  With the paid links system that I offer you will be getting high Page Rank links that Google really takes notice of.  High PR links shoot you up the rankings.  Also consider the time this is going to take you.  If your hourly rate is around £40 an hour then this process will cost you £120 worth of time and you will have to go to several of these sites daily to get the most out of them.

If you are passionate about DIY link building these sites offer you links for sure, so get stuck in and please come back and comment on this post about how you found it building links to your site for free.